Maybe she didn’t understand what I was asking. “Who?”
“You will find the One Who Is Two.” The empty black shadows stared at me from the face of Mrs. English.
“Why me?”
“Because you are the Wayward. The one who marks the way between our worlds. The Demon world and the Mortal world.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be the Wayward.” I said it without thinking, but it was true. I didn’t know how to find this person. And I didn’t want the fate of the Mortal and Caster worlds resting with me.
The walls began to shake again, the ceramic figurines knocking against one another. I watched as the little moon moved dangerously close to the edge of the mantel. “I understand. We cannot choose what we are in the Order. I am the Demon Queen.” Did she mean that she didn’t want to be what she was either? “The Order of Things exists beyond. The River flows. The Wheel turns. This moment changes the next. You have changed everything.” The walls ceased shaking, and the moon stopped just before it fell over the edge.
“This is the way. There is no other.”
I understood that.
It was the last thing the Lilum said before the possessed body of Mrs. English dropped to the floor.
11.01
Bad-Eye Side
With her glasses knocked off, her glass eye closed, and her hair unraveled from its maniacal bun—Lilian English almost looked like a person.
A nice person.
I called 911. Then I sat in the worn flowered chair, staring at Mrs. English’s body, waiting for the ambulance. I wondered if she was dead. Another casualty in this war I wasn’t sure we could win.
Another thing that was my fault.
The ambulance arrived not long after that. By the time Woody Porter and Bud Sweet found a pulse, I could breathe again. I watched as they loaded the gurney into the back of the “bus,” as Woody called it.
“Anyone you can call for her?” Bud asked as he slammed the ambulance doors.
There was one person.
“Yeah. I’ll call someone.” I went back into Mrs. English’s tiny house, through the hall and into the kitchen with the hummingbird wallpaper. I didn’t want to call my dad, but I owed Mrs. English that much after everything she’d been through. I lifted the pastel pink receiver off the cradle and stared at the rows of numbers.
My hand started to shake.
I couldn’t remember my phone number.
Maybe I was in shock. That’s what I kept telling myself, but I knew it was more than that. Something was happening to me. What I didn’t know was why.
I closed my eyes, willing my fingers to find the right numbers.
Combinations of numbers marched through my mind. Lena’s number and Link’s and the Gatlin County Library’s. There was only one phone number I couldn’t remember.
My own.
Lilian English missed her first day of school in about a hundred and fifty years. The actual diagnosis was severe exhaustion. It made sense, I guess. Abraham and Sarafine could do that to anyone, even without the help of a Demon Queen.
Which left Lena and me hanging out alone in the classroom a few days later. Class was over, and Principal Harper had collected the pile of papers he would never grade, but we were still sitting at our desks.
I think we both wanted to stay a while longer in the place where Mrs. English had never been a puppet, where she’d been a Demon Queen all her own. The real Mrs. English was the hand of justice, even if she wasn’t the Wheel of Fate. There was never a curve in her class. Between that and the whole Crucible thing, I could see why the Lilum had thrived in Mrs. English’s body.
“I should have known. She was acting creepy all year.” I sighed. “And I knew her glass eye was on the wrong side at least once.”
“You think the Lilum was teaching our English class? You said the Lilum talked really weird. We would’ve noticed.” Lena was right.
“The Lilum must have been inside Mrs. English some of the time, because Abraham and Sarafine showed up at her house. And, trust me, they knew what they were looking for.”
We were sitting in silence at opposite ends of the room. Today, I was on the Bad-Eye Side. It was that kind of day. I had recounted every detail of the other night to Lena three times, except the part about forgetting my phone number. I didn’t want her to worry, too. But she was still having trouble wrapping her mind around it all. I couldn’t blame her. I had been there, and I wasn’t doing much better.
Lena finally said something, from the Good-Eye Side. “Why do you think we have to find this One Who Is Two?” She was more upset than I was, maybe because she had just found out about it. Or maybe because it involved her mother.
“Did you miss the whole Crucible speech?” I’d told her everything I could remember.